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Speaker Interview: Jorge Castro

Jorge Castro took a few minutes to answer a some questions for the SCALE Team. His presentation on "Service Orchestration in the Cloud with Juju" is scheduled for Saturday at SCALE 12X.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: I work on the Juju Ecosystem team at Canonical. We're charged with making workloads that people deploy in clouds easy for people to use. So for example we make it so you can fire up a Hadoop cluster in a few commands, or get a sharded MongoDB deployment going. Things like that.

Generally speaking I am also the "community guy" for Ubuntu Cloud and Server, so this usually involves getting feedback from users and helping them get what they need out of Ubuntu. I am a former (recovering?) sysadmin but that was so long ago.

Q: You're giving a talk on "Service Orchestration in the Cloud with Juju." Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: One of the problems people have been constantly telling us is that deploying complex infrastructure is too hard. People are spending more time wrestling with configuring and managing services than they actually spend learning the actual tool itself. That sucks; so we want to make it so that anybody in the world can just deploy anything they want at scale and getting real work done instead of wrestling with config files all day.

So we made a service orchestration tool that does this, and when used in combination with configuration management tools you can replicate that same level of automation that the big scaling shops do with little effort. If you've attended Phil Dibowitz's scaling talks at SCALE then you know people like that are pushing the edge of devops -- our goal is to bring that level of sophistication to every user.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: This is my fourth SCALE, it's always a good time, not just professionally but in that community sort of way. It's my favorite show to attend because we can do "work things" during the conference that people are passionate about without having to deal with the nonsense of some of the more commercial shows. The speakers that are here want to be here and aren't reading some marketing thing in front of their audience, they use and love these tools and they get excited to show people what they're working on.

Q: Is there anything else you'd like to add?

A: Yes! If you deal with Linux servers every day and want to learn how to save some time and effort, come to my talk! If you have any feedback on how we can make Ubuntu Server for you then by all means feel free to give me your feedback!